


The Sorcerer (is an) Apprentice

by Killbothtwins



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Canon Era, Gen, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Magic, Sorcerer's Apprentice References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-18
Updated: 2021-01-18
Packaged: 2021-03-17 00:28:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28840152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Killbothtwins/pseuds/Killbothtwins
Summary: Merlin tries a shortcut on his chores. Things (somewhat predictably) go awry.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 41





	The Sorcerer (is an) Apprentice

The ceiling of Arthur’s chambers, right above the fireplace, is getting sooty. 

Merlin has been noticing it for a few weeks now— it’s been spreading and really it looks quite ugly— but is at a loss of what to do about it. While it is technically his job to keep the Prince Regent’s chambers clean, usually the most Merlin can do is make sure nothing is actively growing, the sheets and clothes are clean, and there are no assassins hiding behind the curtains. 

Merlin’s life is busy, which means he doesn’t always have time to scrub everything to  _ perfection,  _ exactly, but he keeps things neat. He thinks this is pretty impressive, considering that most days he’s doing the job of a manservant, physician’s apprentice, warlock with a destiny and many people trying to kill him, royal advisor, and stablehand all at once. 

Arthur does not seem to appreciate this. 

“My ceiling is disgusting, Merlin,” he says, sitting back in his stupid princely chair and looking through reports. 

“Really?” asks Merlin, looking up innocently. “I haven’t noticed a thing.”    


Arthur scoffs. “Of course not. You’re as observant as a doorknob.” 

“Why, thank you,” Merlin says. He was busy for most of last week foiling an apparent attempt to poison  _ all  _ the crops in Camelot, and he’d almost gotten stabbed one too many times for comfort. “I’m sure  _ you,  _ on the other hand, still haven’t noticed that I’ve mended your favorite shirt.”    
  
“No, why would I notice that?” 

“You’re wearing it,” Merlin points out, and Arthur throws a quill at him. 

“Merlin!” he says. “Stop stalling! I want that ceiling cleaned  _ today.  _ It’s not fit for a prince, and certainly not for the Regent. Besides, I keep seeing it when I go to sleep at night, and I’m pretty sure that thing is getting toxic.”    
  
Merlin scowls at him. 

“Don’t pout,” Arthur says. “This means you get out of the hunting trip with the visiting nobles from the estates.”    
  
Merlin brightens at that. He  _ does  _ hate hunting, and being around the nobles might be a little awkward considering that they were one less today thanks to him. It hadn’t been related to the poisoning thing, but Merlin  _ had  _ almost gotten stabbed again. He’d forged a letter stating the man had gone home, which he was getting pretty good at.

“Really?” he says. “Wait, no, that’s still not fair! How am I supposed to get up  _ there?”  _ He points upward, to the Soot Stain, a good three feet above his head. 

Presumably, the servants before Merlin had somehow eliminated the dreaded Soot Stains from Arthur’s precious royal fireplace, but that secret has never been passed on to Merlin. Maybe he’s somehow making the fire wrong— there are a lot of things he’d never known  _ anyone  _ could do wrong until he got to Camelot. Bowing, talking, forks. You’re not supposed to talk to a noble until they talk first, etc., etc. Now Merlin knows most of the ways he’s doing these things wrong, so he can more easily choose to ignore them. 

“I don’t know,” Arthur says, rolling his eyes as if it’s  _ Merlin  _ being ridiculous. “I’m sure you can somehow figure out a way.”    


“You’re so generous,” Merlin says. “I’m sure I can’t imagine why all of your previous servants left without leaving me instructions on how to take care of your perfect princely belongings.”    
  
Now Arthur throws an entire ledger at him, so Merlin decides it’s probably time for him to bring up lunch from the kitchens. 

* * *

Later, Merlin rolls up his sleeves and contemplates the Soot Stain, and the bucket of suds he’s got laid out on the floor. 

Possibly, he could disintegrate the soot from the ceiling using magic. Of course, it’s then always possible that he’ll overshoot a little and disintegrate part of the ceiling too. This is something that has never happened to Merlin, especially not with Arthur’s previous favorite shirt. 

Well, Arthur’s going to be gone all day hunting. 

Merlin goes over and locks the door, then, under further consideration, drags a chair over and pushes it in front. 

Then he lets his eyes flash gold, and the scrub brush in the soapy water flies up to the ceiling and starts scrubbing industriously. 

Merlin beams, pleased with himself. He’s a genius. 

Well, there are a whole lot of  _ other  _ chores to do, aren’t there, and Arthur will be gone for such a long time… 

Merlin winces, and looks around even though he knows there can’t be anyone there. He’s used magic before for some of his chores, but never all of them at once. 

Well, what’s the harm?

* * *

Lancelot is getting quite used to life in Camelot, which is why he’s not all that surprised when he hears what sounds like soggy footsteps, then sees Merlin running down the hall. 

Merlin smacks into him, swears, then looks at him and beams. “Lancelot! Thank the triple goddess it’s you,” he says. 

“Always nice to be so well-received,” Lancelot says. “What’s wrong, Merlin?” 

Merlin winces and looks to the side shiftily. “I could use a little help,” he says, and when Lancelot raises an eyebrow, steps closer. “Er, I had a little magic incident in Arthur’s chambers.” He looks really guilty now, not to mention very wet. 

He’s fairly dishevelled, but Lancelot doesn’t particularly take that as a sign of the seriousness of any given threat— he’s seen Merlin come out of a normal chore looking like he’s fallen down a flight of stairs or three, and also seen him take down assassins and emerge looking neat and pressed as ever. 

“What is it?” Lancelot asks, and Merlin shifts antsily from foot to foot, apparently having remembered why he was running in the first place. 

“So I was trying to speed up my chores, and it was going really well until the rags finished with polishing the armor and decided the window needed to be clean, and the bedsheets stopped folding themselves and started tying around the bedframe—”    
  
Lancelot is a fine knight, and a man of honor, so he does not laugh. “You’re telling me your attempt to make your chores faster has gone awry.”    
  
“ _ Very awry,”  _ Merlin says, relieved. “Can you just go make sure nothing escapes, thank you, I’m going to go see if there’s a counterspell anywhere, thank you, be careful!” He’s off like a shot in the direction of Gaius' tower. 

Lancelot goes to Arthur’s quarters. 

He knows he’s in the right place because he can see water under the door. 

Life is more interesting with Merlin in it, he has to concede. He opens the door. 

More water spills out, and he wades into it with trepidation. It’s up to a little ways above his ankles, not to mention spilling periodically off the walls and the various soggy room decorations. Lancelot ducks inside and shuts the door quickly, lest anyone  _ else  _ see this, and is immediately almost brained by a broom sweeping by. 

Merlin has outdone himself this time. 

There is, it appears, every type of cleaning equipment possible floating around the maelstrom, all trying their best to clean. There’s rags mopping the floor, wringing themselves out, then mopping some more, a feather duster dusting everything in sight, soap determinedly grinding into Arthur’s bed. Lancelot ducks out of instinct; only a moment later, a scrubbing brush hits the wall behind him, drops down, and starts aggressively polishing his shoes. 

Lancelot will wait outside, he decides. 

But as he turns to escape, two brooms fall in front of the door— blocking it in an X like guards with pikes. 

With sudden dread, Lancelot remembers what Merlin had said;  _ don’t let anything escape.  _ Now he sees why. If this is how Camelot falls, it will be embarrassing more than anything else. 

He draws his sword. The brooms, sweeping aggressively, come towards him, and he knocks one away and backs off towards the middle of the room. 

All things considered, this is a fairly impressive series of spellwork— Lancelot had encountered a few sorcerers on his journeys before Camelot, and he doesn’t think any one of them could animate so many objects at once, much less unintentionally and definitely not keep it up from a distance. 

Also impressive is the revelation that the water in the room is all coming from a lone bucket by the fireplace, constantly spilling over like it’s under a water pump. 

The broom flies at his face again and Lancelot whacks it with his sword, which chips the wood but doesn’t break it. Then he almost trips backwards over a determinedly-scrubbing sponge, his boot sliding for an uncomfortably slick moment, before he stumbles backwards and gets his feet under him. 

Lancelot yelps, and gets a mouthful of soap for his troubles. A mop dances by, and enthusiastically starts to clean the door, which is wood and probably won’t appreciate the water, and which looks like it’s about to slip open. One of the sponges had loosened the lock, Lancelot realizes. The mop swooshes off for business elsewhere, but any relief is short-lived. It’s soon replaced by another one of the brooms, which slams against the door. The broom is going to push it open— or at least, it would if Lancelot didn’t hit that away with his sword too. 

He does, and it draws back, almost looking  _ offended,  _ except for the fact that it’s a broom. It circles around, and rears up so the part with the bristles is facing Lancelot, like a hairy face. 

Lancelot winces. “Merlin?” he calls hopefully, and glances over his shoulder. “ _ Merlin?”  _

The broom comes closer. 

“I’m sorry,” Lancelot offers it, in case it will work. It  _ does  _ have an effect, but rather than calm it down, it seems to anger the thing, which swings out toward his face. Lancelot muffles an un-knightly word, and decides the only way to stop it will be to actively destroy it. 

He sheathes his sword and catches the broom in a flying tackle— there’s as much resistance as if he were hitting a man rather than a flimsy stick of wood. The two of them hit the floor. They slide much farther than Lancelot had been accounting for, almost swept away in the now much deeper water, and Lancelot hits the wall with a grunt. 

He’s properly soaked now— as much as Merlin had been when they’d run into each other in the hallway— and spares a second to be glad he’s not wearing full chainmail. He scrambles to his feet and dodges the broom, which slams into the wall where he had been a second earlier. It makes a loud  _ thud  _ noise, which means it had been hard; hard enough Lancelot doesn’t want to know what it feels like when it hits human instead. 

Lancelot spins and strikes out once more, and hits the broom hard enough to knock it off balance— he hits out with his bare hands next and wrestles it to the floor. It squirms, kind of alarmingly human, and Lancelot pins it to the ground with his boot. 

He swings his sword, feeling uncomfortably like an executioner, and splits the broom in half. 

Too late, he realizes the flaw in his plan. 

One broom split in half didn’t kill it— it wasn’t alive, after all. What it  _ did  _ do, however, was make two sticks, one with bristles on the end and the other very sharp, and both mad. 

Lancelot sighs, and admits defeat. “Merlin!” 

* * *

Gwaine hears bubbling, and yelling for Merlin, coming from Arthur’s quarters. He follows, of course, because that’s bound to be a laugh.

When he opens the door, water is swept out onto his feet. Gwaine looks inside, and is only a little surprised when Lancelot, not Arthur, looks up like a stunned deer. He is, Gwaine observes, apparently wrestling with a large bundle of washcloths. They seem to have teamed up on him, which isn’t precisely fair. 

“Mmmph!” Lancelot says. “Gwaine, close the door!” 

Gwaine steps inside and slams the door shut with a bit of resistance. “Er, mate, I’m not sure this is what cleaning tools are quite for.”    
  
Lancelot is a proper knight, so he doesn’t glare at Gwaine, but Gwaine thinks the intention is somehow there. “Thank you, Sir Gwaine,” he says, and somehow manages to not even sound sarcastic. “I’m well aware. There is, er, a situation— watch out the soap hits hard—!” 

Gwaine ducks a bar of soap that whizzes by his ear, only for a hairbrush to clamber up his trouser leg and start to aggressively brush his hair. This is not that agreeable with Gwaine, who is quite fond of his hair, and has a sensitive scalp, if you’re talking about not wanting his hair ripped out at the roots. 

“Ow!” he yelps. “Lancelot!” 

“I know,” Lancelot says, coming over and yanking the other direction on the brush, which holds as fast as if an invisible hand stays it. “They’re… aggressive.” 

“That’s not a usual quality for inanimate objects!” Gwaine yelps, and Lancelot frees the brush. Gwaine punches it, which hurts his hand but is overall kind of satisfying. “What’s going on?” 

Lancelot looks briefly flustered. This is interesting— Lancelot is not a very good liar, which is a great source of amusement among most of the knights. Gwaine is actually interested in what Lancelot will come up with. This is magic, clear and simple; whyever Lancelot is trying to hide it, it must be interesting. 

“Look out,” he says, instead of anything else, and Gwaine moves to the side just in time for a spray of soapy water to hit the wall and drip down. 

“That would have burned,” says Gwaine, cheerfully, and he draws his sword. 

Lancelot winces. “I wouldn’t do that.” He shakes his head at Gwaine’s questioning look. “You do not want to know.” 

Fighting cleaning supplies bare-knuckled is a challenge, but it is at least interesting. Gwaine and Lancelot work into some sort of a rhythm, parrying and steering away from the door and temporarily trapping one thing or another in the wardrobe or a chest or under a boot. 

Lancelot, though frazzled, doesn’t look  _ overly  _ worried about the situation— not like he would if Arthur was being attacked, anyway, or like he’s trying to think of how to stop the Revenge of the Housekeeping Equipment. 

He looks, mostly, like he’s waiting for something. 

Merlin really likes Lancelot— maybe even more than Gwaine, which is pretty rude— so Gwaine is honor-bound to like Lancelot as well. He can wait too. 

In the meanwhile, he punches a sponge, as hard as he can. 

* * *

“I’m back!” Merlin says, running into the room at full tilt. “And I have— ack!” he skids and almost slips on a soapy patch of floor, only to be caught, surprisingly, by Gwaine, who collars his neckerchief and sets him upright with it, like a kitten with a scruff. 

“Please hurry,” Lancelot says, more than a little wild-eyed and sopping wet. 

Merlin glances nervously at Gwaine, then back at Lancelot, who gives him a look like  _ sorry, you know how Gwaine is,  _ and also like  _ there’s a floor brush trying to take the skin off my knees please make it stop. _

“What is this?” Gwaine says, kicking out. It’s perfectly timed and a bottle of boot polish goes flying into the room, hitting the bedcurtains of Arthur’s bed and sliding down with a distinctly moister plop than bedcurtains should ever have. 

“I accidentally bought a cursed scrub brush,” Merlin says, affecting that famous idiot-but-you-love-me smile he’s perfected over the years. 

Gwaine laughs. “You what?” 

Merlin sloshes closer and surreptitiously strengthens the inside of the door with magic— it really would be just like today for something to make an escape. “Arthur wanted me to clean the ceiling, and there was a lady in the marketplace selling these brushes, and she said that it would do most of the work for me! But then it kind of infected everything else.” 

Gwaine grins, looking remarkably unconcerned for all the chaos going on around him. “Can you stop it?” 

“Yeah, I asked Lancelot to, er, keep it quiet while I asked Gaius? I didn’t want to get in trouble. And apparently it just needs a code word to make it stop.” Which is true, in a sense, if you consider a spell a word, which it kind of is. 

But it is also illegal, and will be kind of loud. 

Merlin glances at Lancelot again. 

Lancelot is one of the finest knights of Camelot, and a true friend. He shoves Gwaine’s head into the overflowing bucket on the floor. 

Merlin shouts the spell while Gwaine sputters, feeling his eyes flare gold as the magic bursts forth. The cleaning supplies all stop moving at once, dropping to the floor like dead things. 

Lancelot lets Gwaine go. “Oh dear,” he says. “That mop surely knocked you into the water. Are you all right?”

Gwaine coughs and shakes his head like a dog. “Just great,” he says. 

Water trickles down the wall. A lone bottle of furniture polish rolls to a stop against the wardrobe. 

Merlin starts to laugh first, but at least he  _ tries  _ not to, which is more than he can say for Gwaine. Gwaine’s signature roguish laugh sets them all off, until they’re standing in the middle of the Prince’s sopping wet bedroom, laughing so hard they’re all bent almost double. 

The door opens. 

They all freeze, looking at Arthur, who’s standing in the doorway. To his credit, he doesn’t actually look that mad, just extremely puzzled. 

“Er,” he says, looking at the inches of water on the ground, then up to the knights and Merlin, then at the window, which is so sparkling clean that it’s actually kind of hurting Merlin’s eyes. “What happened in here?” 

“What do you mean?” Gwaine asks, perfectly innocent. 

“What do I—  _ Gwaine,”  _ Arthur says.

“You said to clean your quarters,” Merlin says, and arranges his face into his best pout. “If this is the reaction I’m going to get every time…” 

“Merlin!” Arthur says. “What did you do?” 

“I’m really not sure what you’re talking about,” Merlin says, and has to dodge as a sponge unsticks from the ceiling and falls almost on his head. 

Arthur sighs. “Lancelot?” 

Lancelot’s face is the picture of innocence. “Sire?” 

Arthur sighs again, and points a finger at the three of them. “I expect this to be cleaned up by the time I get back.” Then he turns and leaves. 

Merlin pauses, knowing Arthur well enough to know what’s coming. Sure enough, a moment later Arthur sticks his head back in. “Did you at least get the soot spot?” 

Merlin cranes his head up to look. Like they’re on a string, Gwaine, Lancelot, and Arthur all follow the same path, looking up. The Stain  _ is  _ gone, technically, which means that it’s been replaced with a spot where the ceiling is lighter than the others from being scrubbed so hard. 

“Yup!” Merlin says cheerfully. 

Arthur doesn’t sigh this time so much as  _ gust,  _ and he shakes his head slowly. “Clean it up!” He stalks out the door once more. 

“It  _ is _ already pretty clean,” Merlin says, which sets them all to laughing again. They don’t stop for a while. 


End file.
